Death Penalty Cruel And Unusual Punishment Essay

The Death Penalty: Cruel and Unusual Punishment The death penalty is a cruel process of a bygone era and has no place in modern day civilized society. The death penalty has evolved from a punishment for crimes such as petty theft and adultery to the absolute punishment for crimes such as the rape of a child, kidnapping, treason, and murder, to name a few however the death penalty is fraught with errors. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) Innocence List (2015), during the period 1973 to June, 2015 there has been 155 exonerations due to acquittal, pardons, and charges being dropped. So it should go without saying that a justice system that is flawed to certain degree should not be allowed to impose a penalty that is deliberate, with cruel intent. The death penalty or capital punishment was established as punishment for a crime as far back as the Ancient Laws of China. In 16th century BC Egypt the first death sentence was recorded when a member of non-nobility was ordered to take his own life after being accused of alchemy (Randa, 1997). Britain has influenced America’s death penalty more than any other country and it was actually introduced to the new world by the first European settlers in the 17th century. The first recorded execution was in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608 when Captain …show more content…
One major argument against the death penalty was the gruesomeness of the hangings, so in an attempt to make the death penalty more humane the electric chair, and later the lethal injection was introduced as an alternative. By 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Furman v. Georgia, ruled that the death penalty was in violation of the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the U.S Constitution Eighth Amendment based on Justice Marshal’s hypothesis that a public, once fully informed about the death penalty, would denounce it (Falco & Freiburger,